And so this situation is starting to get ridiculous - and consumers are, as usual, caught in the middle of it all. Google has just blocked Windows Phone devices from accessing Google Maps on their phones. In addition, it also seems Windows Phone users are now restricted to the basic HTML version of the mobile GMail website. While understandable from a defensive perspective - Microsoft's extortion scheme targeting Android device makers and all that - it's still a massive dick move that only hurts consumers. Update: the media attention has worked - Google is backpedalling, and will remove the redirect. "We periodically test Google Maps compatibility with mobile browsers to make sure we deliver the best experience for those users. In our last test, IE mobile still did not offer a good maps experience with no ability to pan or zoom and perform basic map functionality. As a result, we chose to continue to redirect IE mobile users to Google.com where they could at least make local searches. The Firefox mobile browser did offer a somewhat better user experience and that’s why there is no redirect for those users. Recent improvements to IE mobile and Google Maps now deliver a better experience and we are currently working to remove the redirect. We will continue to test Google Maps compatibility with other mobile browsers to ensure the best possible experience for users."

So as a web developer many hours extra are put into supporting IE. We only just stopped supporting IE7,and now you get a not supported/out of date browser warning. The web thinks nothing of that practice. The death of each new IE version is celebrated.

So you're saying that the reason (some) web browsers don't bother complying with W3C standards properly is that they don't need to bother, because web developers will work-around issues anyway?

In that case, the only people we should be blaming is web developers. They should comply with the relevant standards (and nothing else - no browser specific extensions); and if a browser sucks dog balls that's the browser developer's problem and not the web developer's problem.

Instead of putting many extra hours into supporting a broken browser, do nothing, or just add a warning at the top of the page.